That’s where a number of us neanderthals…......supporters gather at the pub & go to a football match. Much shouting & cheering ensues, usually ending up in a mass drunken stupor. Yay for culture say I :¬)

The native populations of CA are represented everywhere, not just the missions. Olvera St. always has native dancers. Knott’s Berry Farm has all kinds of info about the natives of the area. There are tons of museums all over the state. Universities have yearly talks, movies and presentations.

@marinelife : With all due respect, who was here before them? One definition of native states, “belonging by birth to a people regarded as indigenous to a certain place, especially a preliterate people.” The native Hawaiians definitely fit that definition.

They came from islands—they are island natives—extremely far to the south without knowing anything about where they were headed. The only thing they had to guide them were the stars. The last phenomenon that guided them here was the glow of the volcano Kilauea. They had no information that there was land north to where they were headed.

To state native Hawaiians are immigrants and shrug them off means you must find the Garden of Eden, because we are all immigrants from “there.” Native Americans are immigrants. Early Europeans were immigrants. Everybody moved out from somewhere to somewhere else.

I guess I’m just about as native or indigenous as anyone else on this island, probably with a bit of Viking thrown in for good measure, people like to hang out at Stonehenge at the summer solstice and take copious amounts of drugs just like our pagan forefathers before us, damn those pesky Christians that had to come here and spoil everything with their modern ways.

In Toronto, there are a lot of ethnic festivals going on all the time, because of the large immigrant populations here (I know they’re not native or indigenous, but still).

Back home in Northern Ontario, there’s a much larger First Nations community, and several reserves near my hometown. There’s often some kind of gathering or powwow happening up there. I don’t participate myself, but one of my former classmates is always posting things on Facebook.